Mentioning war just not cricket

By PETER POPHAM

PESHAWAR - The balmy October day is normal for the start of the winter season in the cricket-mad subcontinent.

The Peshawar outfield is a little moth-eaten but the strip is hard and true. Spectators are few, which is true of cricket matches between fair-to-middling teams all over the world.

The metal numbers on the flaking scoreboard are changed every 20 minutes or so, whenever somebody remembers to do it. The only thing that suggests the game is in any way extraordinary is the presence of 10 Pakistani policemen beyond the boundary rope, one armed with a Kalashnikov, one with a teargas gun, the rest with long bamboo sticks known as lathis.

Afghan's national cricket team began a tour of Pakistan yesterday, and if the timing of the event seems to any of them awkward or inauspicious, they are at pains not to let it show. Stiff upper lips are a part of cricket in the Hindu Kush as they are in the Cotswolds.

"We have the sense that Afghanistan is under bombardment and that innocent people have been killed," captain Allah Dad Noori says cautiously. "But we have come here to play cricket and to show the world that we are not terrorists but just ordinary people. We are the peace ambassadors of Afghanistan."

Their national game is called Buzkashi, a murderous free-for-all in which pony riders fight each other to scoop up the carcass of an animal. But the Taleban permit cricket and soccer providing players wear traditional baggy clothing.

Afghans who fled the Soviet invasion of 1979 and wound up in refugee camps around Peshawar started learning cricket 20 years ago, and it has caught on. Most of the touring team still divide their lives between Afghanistan and Pakistan, working as carpet or dry-fruit merchants, for example. That may help to explain their phlegm in the face of war.

"We are talking to our families on the phone," says the captain's brother, casting glances to see if the tailenders can nudge the score to something respectable against a Peshawar side. "They don't seem too worried. Life goes on."

More serious discussion is discouraged. "We don't want to talk about politics," says Allah Dad Noori. "We came here to play cricket."

Afghanistan were all out for 128 in their first innings.

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INDEPENDENT

Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror

Afghanistan facts and links